Michael Tolliver Lives (8 page)

At my suggestion Ben had a bathhouse afternoon just before we left for Orlando. I was paying penance-in-advance, I guess, for inflicting my family on him. (My
biological
family, that is—as opposed to my logical one—as Anna likes to put it.) So Ben took off for the Steamworks at noon, and I stayed at home to wash the truck and curl up in the window seat with a glass of chocolate soymilk and the latest issue of
American Bungalow
magazine. There was an article on Bisbee, Arizona, and its funky little bungalow neighborhoods, and I wondered if that would make a good destination for us; we’d loved our recent road trip through the Southwest and had talked of returning.

I laid down the magazine and glanced at the clock. It was almost one.

He’s bound to be there by now, already undressed and wrapped in a towel, already cruising the hallways. He’s searching for daddies, of course, preferably with fur, politely deflecting the young and the smooth, the ones who inevitably regard him as their natural birthright. But it won’t be long before he finds what he wants…

I picked up the magazine again, losing myself in the Southwest. In Monument Valley we hired a Navajo guide named Harley, a chummy twenty-seven-year-old in a Metallica sweatshirt who, for a few dollars more, drove us into sacred territory, a roadless landscape of bloodred monoliths reserved for tribal ceremonies and the occasional Toyota commercial. I don’t know if Harley knew we were a couple—he may well have mistaken us for father and son—but he gave a sweet little spiel about the Navajo nation’s reverence for androgyny and later played his flute for us and sang while we lay on our backs in a cave, goofy with peace, staring up through a hole at a perfect circle of sky.

By now he’s spotted someone—across the steam room, maybe, or loitering in a corner of the labyrinth. He’s a bearded history prof at Berkeley, Jewish possibly, or a black Amway salesman from Oakland with silver at his temples, or some beefy working-class Irish brute. Whoever he is, he’s reaching for my husband right now, cupping those clean-shaven balls in his hairy hand as he smiles with avuncular assurance.

The gutters, I realized, were in serious need of cleaning, so I dragged the extension ladder from the truck and propped it against the house. I have just the slightest touch of acrophobia, so the climb left me woozy. I steadied myself at the top, catching my breath for a moment as I gazed across the valley at the television tower on Mount Sutro. It’s a gangly
War of the Worlds
monstrosity, but sometimes—like that particular afternoon—the fog erases everything but the top three antennae, creating the ghostly effect of a galleon sailing above the clouds, the Castro’s own
Flying Dutchman
.

They’ve gone to the guy’s room, no doubt. Or maybe to Ben’s, if he rented one this time. The terrycloth has hit the deck by now, and somebody’s blowing somebody. Or maybe they’re even fucking already. Right. This. Very. Moment.

I began scooping handfuls of leaves out of the gutter. It’s a handsome gutter, as gutters go: copper beginning to show traces of green. I installed it ten years ago, right after Thack moved out, partly to reassert my dominion over the house. The downspouts were badly clogged with leaves last winter, inundating the terrace at one point and threatening to do the same to the house. This year I’d be ready for the rain.

When the gutters were clean, I climbed down from the ladder and returned it to the truck before raking the rotten leaves from the terrace. There was still space left in the green recycling bin, so I crammed in a few dead fronds from the tree fern at the end of the driveway. The rest of the garden looked okay, but I figured there were chores aplenty in the kitchen. Sure enough, the grime under the sink had reached crisis proportions, so I pulled out all the rusting cleanser containers and Simple Greened the hell out of the place.

Are they done yet? Or have they started all over again? Are they lying somewhere together now, catching their breath, explaining themselves to each other?

By four o’clock I was on the sofa watching a Netflix movie. Normally I save them for the two of us, but this one was a thriller, and Ben’s never been crazy about the creepy stuff. Besides, I required serious distraction, and I’d run out of stuff to clean.

In the midst of the movie the phone rang. I hit mute and picked up the receiver. “Hello.”

“Hi, babe. It’s me. I’m on the bridge.”

“Hey, sweetie.”

“What are you up to?” he asked.

“Just a movie,” I said. “Sharon Stone in a big house with snakes dropping from the chandeliers.”

“Glad I missed that one.”

“How were the tubs?”

“Okay,” he said with a comforting lack of enthusiasm.

“Just okay?”

“It was pretty slow for a Sunday.”

“Ah. That’s too bad.”

“There was this guy from San Leandro who was kinda hot, but he had awful dragon breath.”

“Ugh,” I said, but of course I meant Thank You, Jesus.

“He knows you, in fact,” Ben added. “Or of you, anyway. You worked on his ex’s backyard in Pacific Heights.”

“It’s not ringing a bell,” I said.

“It was back in the eighties, I think. He remembered your name, that’s all. It doesn’t matter.”

He was right. All that mattered was that Ben had brought up my name to this foul-smelling stud, making it patently clear that he already belonged to someone else.

“Do we need anything?” he asked.

I did a quick mental inventory. “We’re out of laundry detergent, if you feel like stopping at the corner.”

“Okay. What about for dinner?”

“I thought we’d do some chicken on the grill. I got this great new finishing sauce with apple and chipotle. Fuck!”

“What?”

“We’re out of propane.”

“No we’re not. There’s a spare tank in the shed.”

“Oh, you’re right,” I said. “What would I do without you?”

He chuckled. “Watch Sharon Stone movies, I guess.”

We lay on the sofa after supper, intertwined and swapping endearments. I won’t bother to repeat them here. Whoever named them sweet nothings was right. They really are nothing; they’re little more than footnotes to a feeling, almost useless out of context.

“You know what?” said Ben, idly caressing my chest.

“What?”

“I’d sort of given up believing this could happen. I thought I was being unrealistic.”

“C’mon,” I said. “You’re thirty-three.”

“So?”

“So that’s too early to have given up.” I realized this was bullshit the moment it came out of my mouth. I spent most of my twenties feeling unrealistic about love.

“You don’t know,” said Ben. “It’s not that easy to find an older guy who isn’t already fucked up.”

“Why, thank you, Colonel Butler!”

He laughed. “I mean it.”

“I know,” I said, kissing the top of his head.

“Your generation has a lot of baggage.”

I said that’s why I preferred not to date them.

“They think of themselves as liberated, but there are so many wounded old tarts out there. Sex inside a relationship scares the holy shit out of them.”

“Well, I’m grateful for them,” I said. “They were saving you for me.”

He snuggled closer and pecked me on the ear. We were silent for a while.

“I saw Anna at the Bi-Rite,” he said at last. “She was there all by herself, just humming away over the produce bins.”

I told him that Anna liked to walk to the market sometimes, that she usually referred to it as her “constitutional.”

“I hope I’m still that vigorous when I’m her age,” Ben said. “I hope you are, too,” I replied. “I’ll be a hundred and five, so I won’t much feel like getting the groceries.”

He laughed. “Did she ever have…you know…anybody?”

“Anna, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

I thought about that for a moment. “One or two, I guess. A long time ago. She had an affair with a married businessman back in the seventies. His wife was a major drunk and he was dying of something, and…Anna gave him a real life for a while. He was dead in a year, but she still keeps his picture around. And there was this guy in Greece in the late eighties. On Lesbos.” I chuckled at the thought of that. “He was an actual Lesbian.”

“What was she doing on Lesbos?”

“Vacationing with her daughter…the lowercase lesbian.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Ben. “So what happened to this guy?”

“Nothing. He’s still there, I guess, if he’s even alive. He was this stocky little guy with white hair and twinkly eyes. He wanted her to come live with him. They were really hot for each other…soul mates even, but…she turned him down.”

“Why?”

I heard myself sighing. “I think it was me, actually.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’d been positive for a couple of years, and everybody just assumed I was about to get sick and die. I assumed it myself. That’s the way it was back then.”

“And she didn’t want to leave you, in case…”

“…she never saw me again.”

Ben muttered a reverential “Wow.”

“She never said that, of course, but I’m sure it was the reason.”

He petted the side of my head, having already arrived at where I was heading. “You shouldn’t feel guilty about living, honey.”

I told him I felt guilty about not insisting that Anna go back to Greece, that I could have made that my dying wish, that she had been my rock when my lover Jon was dying and it was time for me to return the favor, to place her best interests above my own, especially if I thought I was near death. Anna had waited until she was almost seventy to find a satisfying love, and I had effectively stood in the way of that great happiness.

“She wouldn’t have gone,” said Ben. “Even I can tell that.”

“Maybe not,” I said, “but I should have tried. I could have shown her what she meant to me. I could have been a grown-up about it and not just a needy child. I think of her walking down to the market all by herself…” I started to tear up, surprising myself.

“C’mon. I told you she looked happy. And she’s surrounded by all sorts of people who love and respect her.”

“She doesn’t have this, though.” I meant, of course, a warm body next to hers.

“Well, no, but you didn’t either after Thack left. You thought it was the end of love…you told me so yourself. You can’t control these things, Michael. Life hands you shit, and you have to take it. And nobody can fix that for anybody else.”

Then why do I feel so fixed?
I thought.

8

Darn Straight

M
y brother’s living room in Orlando is two stories high, a cathedral of drywall with portholes high up that look out into the tops of palm trees. Ben and I found five such houses on that cul-de-sac, but Irwin had made a point of telling us that the Tolliver residence would be the only one with a speedboat in the driveway: “There’s no way you can miss it, bro.” There was no way you could miss it from the living room, either, thanks to a strategically positioned sofa. Irwin’s latest toy was perfectly framed in the window as he sang its praises from a big leather armchair shaped like a catcher’s mitt.

“She’s a hottie, ain’t she?”

At fifty-seven Irwin was just too old to be using the word
hottie
. Even to describe a boat.
Especially
to describe a boat. But it gave him something safe to talk about beyond that
other
hottie under scrutiny—the man I’d just introduced as my husband.

“That’s quite a color,” I said. “What do they call that?”

“That’s your citron yellow.”

I thought about that. “Guess
lemon
’s a word they try to avoid.”

Typically, Irwin mistook ironic observation for criticism. “She’s no lemon, I can tell you that.”

“No…I didn’t mean…That color must look great on the water.”

“And lemme tell you, that baby turns on a dime. She’s a Cobalt 240 with all the extras…reversed chines and everything.”

I had no idea what a reversed chine was and had no intention of asking, since Irwin was obviously testing me. All he’s ever required to be boring is the frank admission of anyone else’s ignorance. “Irwin really knows his boats,” I told Ben pointedly.

Ben was a gentleman and led us elsewhere. “Did you guys have boats when you were little?”

“Darn straight we did!” Irwin said, and I realized then exactly how low he had sunk in his recent effort to Christianize his cussing.
Darn straight? Who the fuck says that?

“It was really Irwin’s boat,” I told Ben. “I was just crew.”

“Hey, remember the night we snuck down to Lake Tibet?”

The name of that lake, I explained to Ben, was spelled like the Himalayan country but around these parts usually pronounced “Tibbit.”

My brother confirmed this oddity. “Our granddaddy called it that, too. I had this dinky little rowboat hidden down there in the reeds. The folks didn’t even know about it. They thought we were at the movies. Remember, Mikey?”

How could I have forgotten? I had waited all goddamn year to see
Mary Poppins,
starring my favorite person in the world, when Irwin, newly licensed and hormonally imbalanced, had hijacked me to the swamps. “I remember,” I told him.

“Boy,” he murmured, “we hunted us some gators that night.”

Ben gave me one of his looks. “
You
hunted gators?”

“Is that so hard to fathom?”

“Well, yeah,” he said, smirking.

“We didn’t really hunt ’em,” my brother admitted. “It was more like…harass ’em.” He chuckled, warming to the memory. “We’d shine our flashlights around until we could see their eyes…sometimes there were hundreds of ’em shining out there in the dark…but we were lookin’ for the eyes that were closest together.”

Ben was obviously confused.

“That meant they were little,” I explained, “and couldn’t hurt us.”

“Ah.”

“Then,” said Irwin, “we’d stun ’em with an oar and toss ’em in a bucket.”

Ben turned to me with furrowed brow. “Why would you do that?”